Predicting Political Events

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Why We Keep Guessing at the Wrapped Present

 

The future is the next moment. We live in a permanent transition between the past and what comes next, and the thin strip we call the present is mostly a polite fiction. Yet we spend enormous energy trying to predict what lies on the other side of it — and we are, with remarkable consistency, wrong.

The easy prediction is: predicting that our predictions will fail. The harder questions are the ones we rarely stop to ask. Why do we predict in the first place? What exactly are we predicting? And would our behaviour be any different because of our predictions?

I cannot answer these questions definitively. But I think they are worth unpacking, because how we answer them determines whether political prediction is a useful discipline or an elaborate form of self-reassurance, or self-destruction.

 

Not all predictions are alike. At the quietest end of the spectrum sit predictions that neither affect our behaviour nor are affected by it. Scientists tell us that the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own in roughly two billion years. This is an educated estimate, grounded in precise mathematics and physics — and still, technically, a prediction, since a great deal could happen between now and then. But we will not reorganise our foreign policy around it. No government will call an emergency session. No pundit will appear on television to analyse the implications for the next election cycle. It is the one category of prediction that is genuinely free of us, and perhaps for that reason, the one we find easiest to accept.

A step closer to home are predictions that will not be changed by our behaviour, even if they change us. The weather is the classic example. We do not alter tomorrow's rain by predicting it; we only alter how we dress. The forecast does not make itself true or false — it simply describes what is coming, and we adjust accordingly. This category has limited but real application in politics: there are situations where the actions of one part of the world are simply too distant, too disconnected, to bend the outcome in another.

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The most interesting category, and the one that matters most in political life, is where prediction and behaviour fold back on each other. These are predictions that change the very thing they are predicting.

A teacher who tells a student they are likely to fail may be issuing a warning that becomes a wake-up call — the student works harder, performs better, and the prediction is proved wrong by the act of having been made. Or the same warning lands as a verdict, and the student stops trying, and the prediction fulfils itself with terrible efficiency. The prediction is not a passive observation; it is an intervention.

The mechanism is familiar from markets. When speculation about a potential war affecting oil supply begins to circulate seriously, traders do not wait for the shortage to materialise. They act on the prediction. They buy in advance. Prices rise. And so the prediction — higher oil prices — comes true not because of any actual disruption, but because enough people believed it would. The shortage was conjured into existence by the act of forecasting it.

British electoral politics offers a particularly clear version of this loop. For decades, polls consistently predicted that one of the two main parties will win any given constituency, which leads many voters to conclude that a vote for the Greens or the Liberal Democrats is a wasted vote, which leads them either to vote tactically or not to vote at all, which then confirms the poll's prediction. The forecast creates the conditions for its own accuracy. But that loop is not unbreakable. In 2024 it cracked — the Lib Dems surged, the Greens returned MPs, and Reform demonstrated that new predictions can generate new realities just as powerfully as old ones can suppress them. What is shifting now is not just the voting patterns but the underlying belief: once enough people stop treating a prediction as a fact, the prediction loses its grip. Elections may be the most honest laboratory we have for watching that process happen in real time.

 

So why do we predict at all, given that we know this is how it works?

Part of the answer is simple: impatience. We are creatures who cannot wait. Hand someone a wrapped present and watch as they before have touched the ribbon, they are already guessing. We watch a political situation unfold in real time and immediately reach for interpretation, projection, resolution. We spend hours listening to commentators analyse an evolving crisis, speculating about what will happen — and when the expected thing happens, we treat it as confirmation of our analytical powers, without pausing to ask whether the expectation itself shaped the outcome.

But we also predict because we are afraid of being surprised. The guess at the wrapped present is not only eagerness — it is armour. If I can name what is inside before I open it, the opening cannot shock me. And this fear-driven prediction is just as capable of making itself real as the optimistic kind: the candidate who believes they will lose and stops fighting, the movement that convinces itself change is impossible and stops pushing. The anxiety becomes the outcome.

Which brings us to the most honest thing one can say about why our predictions so often fail. We do not predict the future neutrally. We predict through a lens ground by the past — our experiences, our fears, our desires — and that lens bends everything. The optimist sees the conditions that favour the outcome they want; the pessimist sees only the obstacles. We say we are being analytical. We are mostly being autobiographical. And because that bias shapes which predictions we act on, it shapes which self-fulfilling loops we set in motion. The bias and the behaviour-change are not separate causes of error. One feeds the other.

When I flip a coin, I know I have a fifty-fifty chance of heads or tails. I can predict with confidence because the system is closed and the possibilities are finite. But most political coins have an infinite number of sides. Some of those sides only come into existence depending on what I do before the flip. Others emerge only from what I do after it. In a system like that — which is to say, in any system involving human beings in large numbers — prediction is not really prediction at all. It is a declaration of intent, or a confession of fear, dressed up as analysis.

We are also seduced by pattern. History does not repeat itself — but it rhymes, and we love the rhyme. The danger is not that we notice it. The danger is that we approach every new situation already looking for where it rhymes, and in doing so we miss what is genuinely new about it. The notes we cannot place are usually the ones that matter.

 

 

Ahmad baker

30.03.2026

 

PS: I originally wanted to write about this self-acclaimed professor Jiang and his predictions. instead, I found out that I wrote a long academic piece on predictions.